If a federal election was held today, the Conservatives would be narrowly voted in over the Liberals.

So says a new Forum Research poll, which found of 1,350 decided and leaning voters, 39% would support the Tories and 35% would back the Liberals.

The same poll found the NDP got 15% of the vote, while the Bloc Quebecois and the Green Party got a mere 5% and 4%, respectively.

Specifically, the poll found if an election were held today, the Conservatives would get a 169 seat minority government, while the Liberals would win 130 seats. The NDP, BQ, and Green Party would get 26, 12 and one respectively.

The poll also found is that Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s performance approval is down.

Numbers show 43% said they approved of the PM’s performance — down six points since last August (when it was 49%) and 47% said they disapproved of it, up five points from the same period (when it was 42%).

Meanwhile, the jury’s still out on Conservative leader Andrew Scheer, who sees a performance approval of 26% while 30% disapprove and 44% saying they don’t know whether they approve or disapprove.

The same poll also says despite a dip in Trudeau’s popularity, more than 34% see him as the best candidate for prime minister, while Scheer has only 20% support and NDP leader Tom Mulclair has 12%.

Results based on the total sample are considered accurate +/- 3%, 19 times out of 20.

The column's conclusions are a gross exaggeration. First of all, it looks as if the undecideds have been held aside. Second, to go from 'decided voters' to seat distribution is a huge stretch. And third, we are two years from a campaign. Tnat part is fake news.

But it may mean people are tiring of Justin's sugar-coated oafishness.

first its clearly the small business tax increase that is mostly to blame , a policy the liberals didn't even campaign on and something we hadn't even heard of until recently . its been a disaster and was brought in horribly and has made trudeau and morneau both look like ignorant fools .

its clear the liberals followed the Gerard Butts path to power , the same play book he used for mcguinty back in 2003 . it was all about lying to get elected , it doesn't matter what you say or promise as long as you remove the conservative government from power . the small business tax hike is evidence of this as it was never mentioned during the campaign and in fact they promised to lower the tax rate . I don't think business people are the type of people who like being lied to and this has gone over especially bad and destroyed a lot of credibility

trudeau may be a celebrity but Canadians don't want a government lead by some ignorant and arrogant celebrity who thinks he knows best than they do . and who doesn't feel Canadians need to be consulted on issues that effect them . Canadians expect to be a part of the decision process and expect to be consulted , they were not part of the process on the small business issue and it doesn't appear anyone was , it just seems to have came from the inner workings of this government

( the mainstream media is freaking out over the poll results , look at this analysis written by global news trying to discredit the poll , on the basis it might only be an outier as others had the liberals ahead previously )

For the first time since early October, 2015, a pollster has found the Conservatives, and their leader Andrew Scheer, ahead of Justin Trudeau's Liberal Party.

THE CANADIAN PRESS/John Woods

The takeaway from the new poll from Toronto-based Forum Research seems rather remarkable.

If an election were held today, Forum says, 39 per cent of the country would vote for Andrew Scheer’s Conservative Party and 35 per cent would vote for Justin Trudeau’s Liberals.

Forum’s president Lorne Bozinoff doesn’t stop there, though. He then applies his poll result to a seat distribution model and concludes that, if an election were held right now, the result would be a Conservative minority — can you say Prime Minister Andrew Scheer? — where the Tories would have precisely half the seats in the House of Commons. The Tories would win 169, while the Liberals would win 130 seats, the NDP 26, the Bloc Quebecois 12, and the Green Party would keep its single seat.

“Trudeau enters the fall legislative session with his popularity slipping,” Bozinoff said in a statement accompanying the release of the poll on Sunday morning. “The primary beneficiary of Trudeau’s decline is Andrew Scheer’s Conservatives.”

This is just the second poll since early October 2015 that finds anyone but Justin Trudeau’s Liberals in first place. (The other one, from March, was also from Forum.) So, the question quickly posed on social networks is does this poll represent the reality of Canadian public opinion or is it an outlier?

Pollster Forum Research Inc. published a new national poll Sunday which shows the Liberals trailing the Conservatives for the first time since early October, 2015.

Forum Research Inc.

Rival pollsters and statistics scientists will have their own opinions but the only real answer is that we truly cannot know if this is an outlier or reality unless we had an actual general election and were able to compare Forum’s poll against actual results.

Some pundits and political operatives will dismiss Forum out-of-hand because of some polls it has published in the past, where it tries to track political preference in just one riding. (It swung and missed by a wide margin, for example, during a 2013 by-election in the Manitoba riding of Brandon Souris.)

But when Forum takes the national pulse, its record versus the actual results has been as good as its peers and, in some cases, much better. For example, its final poll before the 2015 general election found 40 per cent support for the Liberals, 30 per cent for the Conservatives and 20 per cent for the NDP. The actual results? A 39.5 per cent lead for the Liberals, 31.9 per cent for the Conservatives and 19.7 per cent for the NDP.

In the 2011 general election, Forum was, by some measures, best among its peers when it came to its final poll of that campaign versus actual results.

But in this case, of course, we will not have actual results with which to compare Forum’s. The next best thing then is to take a look at several recent polls to see if Forum may have picked up on a trend.

The Forum poll, which was in the field on Sept. 13 and 14, finds the Conservatives up by four points over the Liberals. Meanwhile, the weekly tracking poll from Nanos Research, for the week ending Sept. 15, finds the Liberals with more than a 10-point lead over the Tories. For the week ending Sept. 8, Nanos had the Liberals were up by 12 points on the Tories.

Campaign Research was in the field Sept. 8-11 and it found the Liberals with a 12-point lead. Abacus Data, polling from Sept. 1-3, also found a 12-point Liberal lead . Mainstreet Research, polling Aug. 28-31, found an 11-point Liberal lead.

So you be the judge: One pollster, Forum, finds a four-point Conservative lead while five other polls from four other pollsters done around the same time find the Liberals up by 10 points or more.

Forum, for the record, uses an interactive voice response telephone survey technology and polled 1,350 for its most recent poll. Forum says the margin-of-error is three percentage points, 19 times out of 20. Campaign Research and Abacus cannot calculate a margin-of-error because their survey population is not selected on a truly random basis. (That’s not to say they may not be accurate; it’s just a statement of statistical fact.) Mainstreet, which also uses a telephone survey method and, as a result, can calculate a margin-of-error, surveyed 2,000 Canadians, reached on both landline and cell phones, and claims it is accurate to within 2.19 percentage points. Similarly, Nanos uses a telephone survey of cellphones and landlines and factors in 1,000 results collected over a four-week rolling sample. It says its margin-of-error is 3.1 percentage points.

And yet, if you take all the polls published since the 2015 election and plotted the results on a graph, as a Wikipedia contributor has done, there appears to be some evidence the spread between Liberals and Conservatives has been tightening somewhat since mid-summer. Still, there’s no denying the big picture that shows Liberal dominance in all polls since the 2015 election.

A Wikipedia contributor has charted the poll results, seen here, published since the 2015 general election campaign.

Wikipedia.org

So what to make it of it all? On social media, the response among political partisans is predictable: Liberals dismiss the Forum poll as an outlier while Conservatives hold it up as proof of how public opinion has swung against the Liberals, likely as a result of their recent misadventures in tax reform.

Outlier or not, thoughtful partisans on either side see it as a reminder that, in politics, odd things can and do often happen. In Canada, we need only point to the circumstances through which B.C. and Alberta ended up with NDP governments or the United States ended up with Donald Trump.

So this Forum poll may remind some Liberals of the dangers of complacency and the damage that may be done to their brand if not enough promises are kept on everything from Indigenous issues to climate change.

For Conservatives who may have privately doubted that new leader Andrew Scheer can topple Trudeau, this Forum poll may give them some heart. The Conservatives have a solid base of support of at least 30-32 per cent no matter the pollster and that party continues to dominate when it comes to political fundraising.

As for the country’s New Democrats, they’re busy wrapping up a leadership race and should have a new permanent leader early next month. That will introduce a new dynamic into the federal political scene and it will be at that point, that all these polls – will start to take on a new importance.

While I have taken issue with all pollsters at one point or another;
Chris Alexander over the weekend was quick to point out that Forums was the only pollster that predicted the Liberal Majority in 2015.

It seems like its not the just the wealthy folks after-all, looks like its the folks effected by the changes and then some.

What makes the poll interesting is that the Liberals still enjoy massive double digit leads in Atlantic Canada and Quebec, the overall national number has moved almost entirely because of shifts in Ontario and BC where the CPC lead according to this poll.

Expect a Nanos and EKOS poll to flank this one within the next day or so showing a robust Liberal lead but still this is interesting given that the last poll by Forums had the LPC with a healthy 7 point lead over the CPC.

Trudeau's challenge is that he has largely had the left to himself for the last two years, if the NDP selects someone other than Ashton you are going to have a crowd on a center-left all of a sudden.

The NDP is polling @ 15.5% based on the Forums poll, if they can make some headway in Ontario and BC it comes at the expense of the LPC.

Its going to be interesting how this is approached moving forward.

The Toronto Star is already out in full force claiming that the Tories fell into "the tax trap" implying this was somehow planned by the Liberals....

This is Scheers opportunity;
The last four election cycles have been all about small business being the backbone of the Canadian Economy, even the NDP in their efforts to target big business made sure to praise small business in the process.

How the Liberals are going after every mom and pop shop across the country, if ever there was a time to go across Canada and start show casing the great work small business is doing across the country its now.

With respect, I don't think the tax steps change that many votes. For one thing, most of the people involved won't know the actual impact for months. I think Corcoran is right -- the major effect will be the way it pushes income into higher tax brackets. But small business is too busy to solicit voter support for an "in the weeds" issue. Collectively they exercise their influence by contributing.

The media is more excited about it than small businessmen! And the opposition has not really been landing blows either, on this or any other issue. So why do we see the Liberals support softening?

I think people are just getting tired of seeing Justin Trudeau flitting around, uttering vacant platitudes and grinning for the camera. The more serious the issues, the more feckless Trudeau appears. He doesn't deliver on his promises anyway. That's how they feel. (Personally, I am glad for that.)

This is because he is only the face of a regime that is essentially both stupidly idealistic and grimly brutal in seeking its goals, despite what people think. Their goals are different from what they ran on ... and those goals are essentially the agendas of intersectional feminism and climate activists. Transgender rights and the carbon tax.

The more people are concerned with jobs and housing costs, the more irrelevant the Liberals will seem. This may be the start of a slow erosion of support for the Liberals that has nothing to do with any particular issue. Let us hope ...

With respect, I don't think the tax steps change that many votes. For one thing, most of the people involved won't know the actual impact for months. I think Corcoran is right -- the major effect will be the way it pushes income into higher tax brackets. But small business is too busy to solicit voter support for an "in the weeds" issue. Collectively they exercise their influence by contributing.

I have to disagree a bit here;
Generally speaking Conservatives in Canada are rarely the ones with the picket signs and the marches in Ottawa, however the noise being made over the last few weeks by business owners and their employees has been significant.

Speaking strictly from a GTA perspective, the tax change structure is the single largest issue MPs have seen letters and emails over in the two years since the last election.

Its not even as much the owners I have seen out over the last few weeks but the employees of the owners who understand that this is a job issues as much as a tax issue.

Trudeau has been the same Trudeau since he entered office so to cite fatigue is challenging, this is the issue that has been everywhere that he has been defiant over that isn't going away.

At a minimum its contributing.

As to your point about owners donating,
I think that is also apt.

My thoughts on Scheer are largely "meh", however if he is the only guy on the side of commonsense on this issue then my previous pledge to not donate till I see something more blue of the guy will have to be rescinded and I would imagine that would be applicable across many lines.

While I have taken issue with all pollsters at one point or another;
Chris Alexander over the weekend was quick to point out that Forums was the only pollster that predicted the Liberal Majority in 2015.

I don't think there is any reason to discredit the forum poll but I find forum is very much a pollster of the moment and these may be the numbers now but are unlikely to stay the same for long

the high cpc numbers are also partly due to polling over 60% in alberta according to poll , although they also had small leads in BC and Ontario and had improved greatly on the east coast at around 36%

With respect, I don't think the tax steps change that many votes. For one thing, most of the people involved won't know the actual impact for months. I think Corcoran is right -- the major effect will be the way it pushes income into higher tax brackets. But small business is too busy to solicit voter support for an "in the weeds" issue. Collectively they exercise their influence by contributing.

The media is more excited about it than small businessmen! And the opposition has not really been landing blows either, on this or any other issue. So why do we see the Liberals support softening?

I think people are just getting tired of seeing Justin Trudeau flitting around, uttering vacant platitudes and grinning for the camera. The more serious the issues, the more feckless Trudeau appears. He doesn't deliver on his promises anyway. That's how they feel. (Personally, I am glad for that.)

This is because he is only the face of a regime that is essentially both stupidly idealistic and grimly brutal in seeking its goals, despite what people think. Their goals are different from what they ran on ... and those goals are essentially the agendas of intersectional feminism and climate activists. Transgender rights and the carbon tax.

The more people are concerned with jobs and housing costs, the more irrelevant the Liberals will seem. This may be the start of a slow erosion of support for the Liberals that has nothing to do with any particular issue. Let us hope ...

I think people are starting to realise the liberals lied and told a tall tale to win the last election . issues like electoral reform were just all talk and gave the liberals credibility on the left .

we also have trudeau's pledge to legalise marijuana which was supported by many young people but now its clear its not going to be like Colorado and instead some sort of bizarre government run monopoly in most places where prices and taxes will be high . if he had campaigned to set up an LCBO like monopoly for pot it wouldn't of generated as much support or interest from young people

and now we have the broken promises to lower small business taxes and then this plan clearly dreamed up by back room bureaucrats who have never ran a business in there lives which will take even more money from the small business owners

I think its becoming more clear each day this government is not about what the little guy wants , its about what the back room liberal bureaucrats and insiders want , there getting what they want , well everyone else isn't even part of the decision process

That's my feeling too. In a way it's more hopeful than if it was a transitory issue. Don't get me wrong, taxes are an important issues for small businesses, but so is the carbon tax and so are the hydro rates and the new minimum wage, and on and on ... in Ontario, at least, it's bad government everywhere you look.

Cosmo probably has a better insight into the impact of these new tax rulings on small businesses, but i wonder -- how many of those people voted for Trudeau anyway?

Ballot – The latest Nanos federal ballot tracking has the Liberals at 38.5 per cent support, followed by the Conservatives at 32.5 per cent, the NDP at 14.6 percent, the BQ at 6.0 per cent and the Greens at 5.7 per cent.

Accessible Voters – Asked whether they would consider voting for each of the federal parties, 52.8 per cent of Canadians say they would consider voting Liberal while 45.2 per cent would consider voting Conservative. Almost four in ten Canadians (37.8%) would consider voting NDP while 38.5 per cent and 30.3 per cent of Canadians would consider voting for the BQ and Green parties respectively.[ ...]
http://www.nationalnewswatch.c.....cpU_2iPLIU

Ballot – The latest Nanos federal ballot tracking has the Liberals at 38.5 per cent support, followed by the Conservatives at 32.5 per cent, the NDP at 14.6 percent, the BQ at 6.0 per cent and the Greens at 5.7 per cent.

Accessible Voters – Asked whether they would consider voting for each of the federal parties, 52.8 per cent of Canadians say they would consider voting Liberal while 45.2 per cent would consider voting Conservative. Almost four in ten Canadians (37.8%) would consider voting NDP while 38.5 per cent and 30.3 per cent of Canadians would consider voting for the BQ and Green parties respectively.[ ...]
http://www.nationalnewswatch.c.....cpU_2iPLIU

Almost on cue!

The thing to note about the Nanos Power Index Polling is they use a rolling average of the last four polls conducted;

Notice the phrasing of the question ... it's very soft. It only asks if people would consider voting for any of the parties. Some people might mention two parties. It isn't clear what this question picks up. I am a solid Conservative voter, but if Scheer really messes up, I would consider voting green just as a protest. How would people like me answer?

Ballot – The latest Nanos federal ballot tracking has the Liberals at 38.5 per cent support, followed by the Conservatives at 32.5 per cent, the NDP at 14.6 percent, the BQ at 6.0 per cent and the Greens at 5.7 per cent.

Accessible Voters – Asked whether they would consider voting for each of the federal parties, 52.8 per cent of Canadians say they would consider voting Liberal while 45.2 per cent would consider voting Conservative. Almost four in ten Canadians (37.8%) would consider voting NDP while 38.5 per cent and 30.3 per cent of Canadians would consider voting for the BQ and Green parties respectively.[ ...]
http://www.nationalnewswatch.c.....cpU_2iPLIU

Almost on cue!

The thing to note about the Nanos Power Index Polling is they use a rolling average of the last four polls conducted;

For a single one of these polls to drag the average down from a previous 11 pt lead to a 6 pt lead must mean the results were not great this time around.

most of the Nanos polls seem to have the liberals doing well , its not really a surprise his polls still have them ahead , where is others have different numbers .

either way the overall numbers are getting closer , not that long ago they were talking about the liberals winning more seats and possibly an even bigger majority but with these numbers there fighting to hold on to many marginal seats and not gaining a whole lot of new seats

after thinking about this some more , think what it tells me is not that the CPC is suddenly going to beat the liberals . more than the 2019 election is going to be more competitive than previously though . think many people had written off the opposition and seemingly given trudeau at least one more term . the cpc isn't going to be competitive in trudeau's Papineau riding or Morneau's Toronto centre seat but it does seem that seats like Kanata Carleton and Kilodan St Paul will be much closer in the future

but perhaps there is a % of the Canadian population saying not so fast , maybe this isn't what we want in a government ? perhaps after the broken promises on electoral reform , taxes , the bizarre castro comments and making Omar Khadr a millionaire . people are starting to get tired of this government and its celebrity leader

one interesting note not really discussed yet by anyone or any news articles , was that the forum poll had "millennial " support for the liberals way down , that was a main reason for there record turnout in 2015 and without it not likely to do as well .

but either way it does seem to indicate the next election will actually be very competitive and the conservative party needs to start getting prepared for that and should expect vicious and seemingly bizarre attacks on it from the desperate liberal government .
like the one we saw launched this week against cpc mp Rachel Harder , for supposedly being anti abortion ? even though there is no public record of her being a high profile anti abortion mp , they seem to have decided she is simply due to how she voted on a private members bill

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